Most poets' revisions are disastrous. They buckle and dent what was originally forged at a red-hot heat.

There's always a danger of writers believing their own publicity. We live in a world of puff and solicited blurb, a world of favours and backscratching.

I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.

I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating oeuvre is unavoidable.

Every Monday morning I try to remember to say "Thank you, Lord. I'm not at the Senior Staff Meeting."

I think a philistine environment should be bracing for young artists. You have to make your own enjoyment, you've got to make your own art.

I was the first Arts Council official in the archipelago to do something for what you might call indigenous music.

A good poem is not completely a poem until it has received a critical response that grows out of the poem in an almost biological way.

For me the form, the stanzaic shape, is an endorsement, proof that I'm engaged with the Latin or Greek at an original level, that my versions are explorations.

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy.

I'm not the kind of poet who arranges treasure-hunts to please the academics and keep them busy. Poetry should be surprising in deeper ways.

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Don't go into a relationship with an empty heart, and expect your partner to complete it for you. No heart can ever be complete without the presence of unconditional self-love.

Remove grace, and you have nothing whereby to be saved. Remove free will and you have nothing that could be saved.

Men to be truly won must be won by truth.

Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other.

I call myself a literary agent simply to distinguish myself from actors' agents.

You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.

Stillness is the altar of spirit.

I know that for me I have to get out of the way and let God take control.

Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.